I honestly thought I might. Right up until
the moment the
anesthesiologist was slipping that little rubber cone over my face ("Count
backwards from
100, Sweetie"), part of me
was convinced that I wasnot
going to
survive the breast reduction surgery. Although I never went
so
far as
to update my will
or make a mix-tape of songs for my funeral -- I figured that as
long as they didn't play "My Heart Will Go On," there would
be no reason for me to rise out of my coffin and kick somebody's ass -- I DID spend
some time the night before the surgery looking at family photos and
listening to weepy music. And I DID
write down some basic instructions for keeping *FootNotes*
on the cyber airwaves, should I tragically expire on the operating
table. (How else will my
great-great-great-grandchildren be able to read about talking birds and
middle-aged Spandex?
I ask you?)

And I DID
make a big ceremony out of handing David my engagement and wedding
rings, twenty minutes before the surgery:

Secra:
"You
can give
these back to me when I wake up, Honey. I love you."
(Sniff.)
David: "Um ... I think I have a hole in my pocket."

But I didn't die. Which, I'm hoping at
least some of you will
agree, is a good thing.

It's been a month and some change since I had the breast reduction.
My goal,
going in -- besides being able to see my feet again
for
the first time since Mouth & MacNeal were on the Billboard Hot
100
-- was to chronicle
the whole surgical 'adventure' from start to finish. A
sort of
*Boobage* Diary, as it were, complete with pictures and
pathology
and gruesome daily blurbs all about the color of the fluid in
my
drainage tubes.

Not just any
surgery,
either,
but huge, scary, Slice-You-Open /Scoop-Out-Your-Innards
/Rearrange-Everything/ Then-Sew-The-Whole-Mess Back-Together surgery.
And regardless of how prepared you think you may be, going
into
something like that ... YOU ARE
NOT PREPARED.
I was especially clueless about what the recovery period
would be
like. Before the surgery, I had this lovely vision of me
sitting
in bed in a pair of silk pajamas, sipping hot lemon
tea,
typing amusing
*FootNotes* anecdotes on the laptop while my doting husband plumped my
pillows and brought me fresh bowls of wonton soup. I thought
the
whole thing was going to be one big vacation, basically.
And it was,
I guess ... if your idea of a "vacation"
involves squeezing
bloody goop out of a hole in your
cleavage and going
for eleven days
without taking a shower. The pain wasn't even the worst of
it,
either. The pain has been entirely manageable,
thanks to the nice people at The Percocet Factory (and then later, once
I'd reached the limits of my comfort zone with narcotics, the
nice people at The Ibuprofen and Ice-Pack Factories). The
worst
part for me was (and continues to be) the absolute dearth of anything
even approaching
energy, these past six weeks.
It's as though I am presented with precisely eight ounces of
get-up-and-go, every morning, and 7.99 ounces of
that goes towards healing from surgery. The remaining .01 ounce has to
be evenly divided between David, family, work, friends, housework,
e-mail, laundry, meals, junky pop culture magazines, shopping, paying
bills, pseudo-reality TV, exercise, catching up on world events and
indulging in proper daily exfoliation.

By the time I finish writing this mini-entry, in fact, I
will have
used
up my entire .01 allotment for the day.

Still, I have no regrets. I
LOVE
my new,
streamlined boobage. Pain, mess, inconvenience,
expense,
lack of
energy
aside, I would do the whole thing over again in a hot
minute.
Best of all: I'm still alive. And I plan to STAY
that way for the next forty or fifty or seventy-seven-and-a-half years,
God (and the
San Andreas Fault) willing. If
nothing
else, that should give me enough time to get a proper *FootNotes* entry
written, finally.
Plus I'll have a chance to make that mix tape for my funeral.